Once again, this underscores the need for a moderation system for stories: this is really old news.
This story would be moderated "Redundant" until it fell down somewhere between "Natalie Portman Pours Hot Grits Down Pants" and "Naked and Petrified First Posts".
I was one of those someones, but I didn't think to post my reply here. You addressed pretty much the same points I did, except this one:
All the tools you need to build your own ISO is included in OpenBSD, anybody can make them. Yet nobody does. Think about that.
Actually, one company has, and charges $4.99 for it.
They instituted it due to popular demand.
If enough people wanted a cheap version on CD that they were willing to pay for it in sufficient quantities to make it economical for CheapBytes to pay to burn thousands of copies, how can anyone say there's no demand for the ISO image?
I guarantee you, if they provided an official free ISO, it'd be a major download on LinuxISO.org the day it made it to their site.
The other thing I addressed is *WHY* people want this thing in the first place.
One, as you said, is the download factor; you know you've got the whole thing if the ISO you downloaded is the same size on your HD as it is on the FTP site.
Another is, installing for somebody else, such as at an installfest at your local LUG. Whether you install it from floppies, from an FTP or NFS server, or even just by copying hard drives with Ghost or dd, it's still good to be able to hand the person a CD he can use to reinstall or fix or update or etc. later, when he doesn't have that high-speed connection available.
Another is, snaring people at events. If you can slap a disk in their hand, that's pretty cool. They're more likely to try it than if you just give them a card with http://www.openbsd.org on it.
Another is, businesses. I don't want to have to rely on the availability of another system for my install in some circumstances. In others, when I do use another system to power my install, I still don't want to be stuck *HAVING* to rely on it.
Another is, books and magazines. It's a lot easier for SysAdmin, or even Linux Journal, to justify including a CD if they don't have to burn the damn thing themselves.
McGraw Hill is publishing a series of Unix books right now that include CDs related to the various topics, such as Steve Maxwell's Unix Network Management Tools and the twice-as-long Red Hat Linux Network Managment Tools. Wouldn't you like to see something like "OpenBSD Network Management Tools"?
Or the inclusion of OpenBSD instead of FreeBSD in some other book?
I would. Anybody who wants to see OpenBSD get used by more people should, too.
But leaving aside completely the question of an official ISO, they're accidentally (it appears) giving the impression that they're against that, when they claim to not be against it at all.
4/26/00 - Lots of questions again about OpenBSD. Here is a link to OpenBSD's FAQ talking about ISO images. I feel it is a good idea to respect their wishes as the good folks there have given us a great OS. - billy
They could fix this as simply as adding the following: "If you do create one, feel free to distribute it."
Or better, follow the above with: "If you do, and you're on a stable site that will be there for the long haul such as http://www.linuxiso.org or http://www.sourceforge.net, let us know and we'll link you in this FAQ."
That is, if those are their true intentions. But I see a lot the same old elitist attitude here. Their attitude seems to be: (this is not a quote, this is the impression I get)
"If people choose to misunderstand our FAQ, then that's their problem, not ours."
In reality, anyone who does computer support of any kind (which is what a FAQ is) can tell you:
If it isn't obvious to the reader/user, it isn't obvious.
Just change the FAQ, dudes. If that's too much work, let me know and I'll provide you with the new wording, guaranteed to make it clear that:
1) You encourage people to make ISOs available. 2) You don't do so yourself merely because you don't see the need. 3) You encourage people to buy from you if possible in order to support the project.
Every single one of your precepts is wrong, nearly all of your facts are wrong, and all of your conclusions are based on those faulty facts and precepts.
I'll have to dissect this one paragraph-by-paragraph:
Star Wars was cancelled after it was realised that the technology involved (new types of lasers, etc) did not exist and was not about to, not to mention the fact they could never work out a way to solve the problem of thousands of decoys.
It wasn't cancelled, and the reason it was scaled back was quite the opposite; the people holding the purse strings thought we didn't need to spend that much money to solve the problems. They're still viewed as quite solveable.
However, Clinton recently (within the last year) made a statement to the effect a scaled down version of Star Wars was in the works.
Which proves you *KNEW* it wasn't cancelled, so that makes your first entry kind of curious.
This is in violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972, in which the US and the USSR agreed the largest anti-missile system either one would develop would be to protect one (1) city, e.g. Moscow or Washington.
It is not in violation of the ABM treaty, and you've even listed the proof that it isn't; how could one deploy an anti-missile system to defend Washington without researching and developing it first?
Since you've admitted that the treaty (which, BTW, is held by some scholars to be null and void since it was with a country that no longer exists, and in any event is voidable by either party with six months' notice) allows for deployment, how can you therefore say it disallows research and development?
The point of the ABM treaty, if it's not obvious, is that if a country were to successfully develop such a system, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction would be rendered completely null and void, thus allowing for destruction of at least half industrialized world. And it would be even worse if a country unsuccessfully developed such a system; such a confident country could launch an attack and then find its system fails defending against the counterattack, in which case there would be 100% destruction rather than just 50%.
And thus, why it's fallen out of favor and is likely to be abrogated at some point; because that's not the world situation.
Yes, it's true that we couldn't protect against 100% of a Soviet missile attack, or even probably a Russian one now.
But we most assuredly could protect against an attack by any of the other countries that have nuclear weapons, and against an attack by any of the dozen or so countries that will develop them in the next few years.
Unless, of course, we don't build the damn thing; then we're just screwed.
There is still a great deal of hostility between Russia and the US, and in many ways Russia's current rule is the same as it was, under a new name.
You got part right. Good job.
As a result, there are still a lot of worries about restarting an arms race.
Bzzzt, wrong answer, thanks for playing International Relations!
The Sovs were violating the damn treaty the whole time. The arms race in question was running the whole time; we just spent 8 years tying our shoelaces.
If the US is smart, it will not violate the ABM treaty--therefore, if the US is smart, Star Wars is gone for good.
Doesn't follow. SDI doesn't violate the treaty, so one means little to the other.
If the US is smart, it will get China to sign the treaty, merrily research and develop a system in complete compliance with the treaty, then abrogate it and deploy like crazy.
The file layout of the OpenBSD CD is copyrighted by Theo (the creator/packager of the OS) which makes copying, downloading and burning the CD illegal. This allows the group to support the project. If you really want it you gotta pay for it.
Actually, this isn't entirely correct.
The layout of their official CD is indeed copyright, and indeed proprietary and closed and just generally anti-open.
However, there is nothing stopping you from downloading the files, making your own ISO, and doing anything at all that you please with it.
They just don't make that very clear in their FAQ.
It's no wonder it's confusing. I'm trying to convince one of them (privately, I will not name names, except to say it's not Theo) to either change the FAQ, or let me change it. We'll see what happens.
I'm not confused, but lots of folks are. See the FAQ at LinuxISO.org for a perfect example; billy thinks it's the OpenBSD team's wishes that you don't create ISOs and distribute them, but that's neither my understanding from a careful reading of the OpenBSD FAQ, nor is it the view of the person with whom I'm corresponding.
It's just an unfortunate side effect of an elitist attitude that isn't at all uncommon in this segment of our industry.
It's the same attitude you see in the various arguments against improved Linux GUIs, user-friendly distributions, etc.
I think someone ought to put together a disk of their own and make the ISO image freely available. There's not a thing Theo could do to stop that.
There's already somebody else doing so cheaply, so free isn't much of a step beyond that.
As far as supporting the project; it's supposed to be open source. Linux and FreeBSD manage to exist without doing anything that asinine; is OpenBSD so unwanted that it can't work the same way?
Perhaps BSDi will bankroll a more complete security audit for FreeBSD, and make the whole question moot. --
And it costs us some of that money even if we filter it out.
Sure, every message from *@info*.microsoft.com that goes into/dev/null through my procmail filter avoids using up disk space on my server, but it still sucks up some bandwidth. I'm paying for that bandwidth, and people upstream from me are paying for it too.
Re:Shouldn't we consider this a "good" thing?
on
Athlons Sold Out
·
· Score: 2
JIT is kind of difficult in semiconductor fabrication.
It's not like the truck can pull up with a load of transistors right before you need them.
If upgradeability concerns you (and it shouldn't, there are several good methods of managing this, not the least of which being "make uninstall" with most decent newer programs) then you can always install a package manager, and follow a distribution's conventions.
Nothing prevents you from using RPM, for instance, on your homemade non-RedHat system.
Putting something in print that was submitted anonymously is just flat out irresponsible.
You had me, right up until this statement.
In the middle of an insightful, well-reasoned post, this is just rubbish.
If you submit something to Slashdot anonymously, you're not sending it to small, secret group of people; you're sending it directly to several tens of thousands of people worldwide, and you're listing it on search engines where it'll show up to anybody typing a keyword or two.
What would be irresponsible would be backtracking the Anonymous postings to identify their poster, so he could be credited; that would completely undermine people's confidence in the anonymity of their postings, and have a chilling effect on a tool that's getting a lot of important messages moved from inside people's brains (where they often aren't accomplishing much) and out into the wide world, where they sometimes are accomplishing useful things.
Slashdot isn't a private messagebase on a BBS somewhere, it's a public forum.
It's a bit like a big reader-edited newspaper, which doesn't really have parallels in the non-virtual world because it's not feasible without Tim Berners-Lee's amazing invention.
I assure you, when we collectively interview somebody, he doesn't assume he's speaking to use in our living rooms privately; he assumes he's being published.
If you post something to Slashdot anonymously, the very act of making it anonymous removes any right you have to hope it remains unpublished, because you've made it unattributable.
The unfamiliar face on the Bridge used to die by the opening credits. I hope the new series has the brains to make the Red Shirt the central character of many episodes, so they can explore the new world (and by reflection, our own) from many vantage points.
Yeah, and *THEN* kill him.:-)
Think Tasia Valenza on "Space: Above and Beyond".:-)
If you're wanting to upgrade your kernel, there's not much point in getting a whole distro.
Especially with Red Hat; 6.2 is not "kernel 2.4" ready. For instance, it ships with the wrong version of modutils, and they don't have an update yet, despite the presence of RPMs on the official modutils distribution site.
A new distro is only necessary for two reasons:
1) Upgrading so many packages at once, that you'd be wasting a massive amount of your presumably valuable time doing it manually.
2) Having the new disk so when you install a new system, it's current.
Otherwise, don't be in a hurry to upgrade; let somebody else find those bugs, while your system chugs along.
About 2 or 3 months after a release is a good time to look the situation over and see if upgrading is the right thing for you.
Half the cost? Maybe, but they already *BOUGHT* the Sun.
So they have two choices:
1) The Sun, total expenditure 100% of the cost of one Sun.
2) The IBM, total expenditure 150% of the cost of one Sun.
All of my co-workers on projects using IBM are wishing like hell they'd picked Sun, and meanwhile my Sun servers are happy as clams, chugging along, unaffected by the crashes over on the Blue side of the data center.
Hey, don't believe stuff just because it's in the legitimate press, either.
A buddy of mine (with some input from me) once released a bogus episode list for an upcoming season of Deep Space 9, and it made it into Australian newspapers as a "studio employee leak".
AICN probably would have spotted that list for what it was.
Such as, perhaps, Slashdot collecting one's real email address for granting a login account?
Collecting one's state of residence before allowing one to participate in a contest that's illegal in some states?
Collecting one's zip code to provide TV listings that actually relate to what's on one's cable offerings?
I think you didn't try very hard to think of those reasons.
Frankly, I think the solution is to simply bar access to one's site completely to anyone who identifies himself as under 13, and blame this law for it. If enough angry parents call their Congressman with complaints about, say, Yahoo suddenly being inaccessible, perhaps this law will be rethought.
WTF is the government doing in this, anyway? I can protect my kid just fine without their help, thankyouverymuch.
When questioned as to exactly why it's better than the wildly successful Palm, and why it's better than the dismal failure WinCE, Microsoft Marketdroid #THX1138 replied:
"Because it's got PC in the name."
Then three guys in black trenchcoats grabbed the questioner and hauled him out back. Scanner listeners at the same time heard this exchange, filtered through Microsoft's proprietary new encryption routine:
But his argument for not putting books online - even books with expired copyrights - is that there is something 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about reading online."
And someday not so long from now he'll die, and progress will go on without him.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, this underscores the need for a moderation system for stories: this is really old news.
This story would be moderated "Redundant" until it fell down somewhere between "Natalie Portman Pours Hot Grits Down Pants" and "Naked and Petrified First Posts".
--
Seems like it would be fairly easy to write some sort of ssh solution. Can ssh be used with services without a password?
.rhosts entries to completely automate login.
In a word, yes.
It's not something you'd want to set up both directions if you don't own both servers, though.
ssh can use a combination of RSA keys and
HOWEVER, it's only secure if you tightly control both ends, which is not the case with, say, your ISP.
--
You're both sorely in need of catching up with the program:
/. back in the day.
RFC 2246 defines (and has for well over a year now) the protocol, and the latest commercial releases of sendmail implement it.
So does the Sun Internet Mail Server
Finally, Weitse Venema's postfix MTA has a freely-available TLS patch that implements SMTP encryption for those of us who don't want to pay for it.
There's even an RPM available.
Postfix, BTW, which used to be called vmailer, is the IBM Alphaworks free MTA project that was covered here in
As, indeed, was this entire portion of this thread.
--
I suspect the spammers are going to swamp it now.
The site I got was pure advertising.
--
I was one of those someones, but I didn't think to post my reply here. You addressed pretty much the same points I did, except this one:
All the tools you need to build your own ISO is included in OpenBSD, anybody can make them. Yet nobody does. Think about that.
Actually, one company has, and charges $4.99 for it.
They instituted it due to popular demand.
If enough people wanted a cheap version on CD that they were willing to pay for it in sufficient quantities to make it economical for CheapBytes to pay to burn thousands of copies, how can anyone say there's no demand for the ISO image?
I guarantee you, if they provided an official free ISO, it'd be a major download on LinuxISO.org the day it made it to their site.
The other thing I addressed is *WHY* people want this thing in the first place.
One, as you said, is the download factor; you know you've got the whole thing if the ISO you downloaded is the same size on your HD as it is on the FTP site.
Another is, installing for somebody else, such as at an installfest at your local LUG. Whether you install it from floppies, from an FTP or NFS server, or even just by copying hard drives with Ghost or dd, it's still good to be able to hand the person a CD he can use to reinstall or fix or update or etc. later, when he doesn't have that high-speed connection available.
Another is, snaring people at events. If you can slap a disk in their hand, that's pretty cool. They're more likely to try it than if you just give them a card with http://www.openbsd.org on it.
Another is, businesses. I don't want to have to rely on the availability of another system for my install in some circumstances. In others, when I do use another system to power my install, I still don't want to be stuck *HAVING* to rely on it.
Another is, books and magazines. It's a lot easier for SysAdmin, or even Linux Journal, to justify including a CD if they don't have to burn the damn thing themselves.
McGraw Hill is publishing a series of Unix books right now that include CDs related to the various topics, such as Steve Maxwell's Unix Network Management Tools and the twice-as-long Red Hat Linux Network Managment Tools. Wouldn't you like to see something like "OpenBSD Network Management Tools"?
Or the inclusion of a CD with Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls?
Or the inclusion of OpenBSD instead of FreeBSD in some other book?
I would. Anybody who wants to see OpenBSD get used by more people should, too.
But leaving aside completely the question of an official ISO, they're accidentally (it appears) giving the impression that they're against that, when they claim to not be against it at all.
Look at this quote from the FAQ at LinuxISO.org's site:
4/26/00 - Lots of questions again about OpenBSD. Here is a link to OpenBSD's FAQ talking about ISO images. I feel it is a good idea to respect their wishes as the good folks there have given us a great OS. - billy
See, he interprets this (link to OpenBSD FAQ entry) to mean that they are opposed to people doing this.
They could fix this as simply as adding the following: "If you do create one, feel free to distribute it."
Or better, follow the above with: "If you do, and you're on a stable site that will be there for the long haul such as http://www.linuxiso.org or http://www.sourceforge.net, let us know and we'll link you in this FAQ."
That is, if those are their true intentions. But I see a lot the same old elitist attitude here. Their attitude seems to be: (this is not a quote, this is the impression I get)
"If people choose to misunderstand our FAQ, then that's their problem, not ours."
In reality, anyone who does computer support of any kind (which is what a FAQ is) can tell you:
If it isn't obvious to the reader/user, it isn't obvious.
Just change the FAQ, dudes. If that's too much work, let me know and I'll provide you with the new wording, guaranteed to make it clear that:
1) You encourage people to make ISOs available.
2) You don't do so yourself merely because you don't see the need.
3) You encourage people to buy from you if possible in order to support the project.
--
Wow, this actually got moderated UP?
Every single one of your precepts is wrong, nearly all of your facts are wrong, and all of your conclusions are based on those faulty facts and precepts.
I'll have to dissect this one paragraph-by-paragraph:
Star Wars was cancelled after it was realised that the technology involved (new types of lasers, etc) did not exist and was not about to, not to mention the fact they could never work out a way to solve the problem of thousands of decoys.
It wasn't cancelled, and the reason it was scaled back was quite the opposite; the people holding the purse strings thought we didn't need to spend that much money to solve the problems. They're still viewed as quite solveable.
However, Clinton recently (within the last year) made a statement to the effect a scaled down version of Star Wars was in the works.
Which proves you *KNEW* it wasn't cancelled, so that makes your first entry kind of curious.
This is in violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972, in which the US and the USSR agreed the largest anti-missile system either one would develop would be to protect one (1) city, e.g. Moscow or Washington.
It is not in violation of the ABM treaty, and you've even listed the proof that it isn't; how could one deploy an anti-missile system to defend Washington without researching and developing it first?
Since you've admitted that the treaty (which, BTW, is held by some scholars to be null and void since it was with a country that no longer exists, and in any event is voidable by either party with six months' notice) allows for deployment, how can you therefore say it disallows research and development?
The point of the ABM treaty, if it's not obvious, is that if a country were to successfully develop such a system, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction would be rendered completely null and void, thus allowing for destruction of at least half industrialized world. And it would be even worse if a country unsuccessfully developed such a system; such a confident country could launch an attack and then find its system fails defending against the counterattack, in which case there would be 100% destruction rather than just 50%.
And thus, why it's fallen out of favor and is likely to be abrogated at some point; because that's not the world situation.
Yes, it's true that we couldn't protect against 100% of a Soviet missile attack, or even probably a Russian one now.
But we most assuredly could protect against an attack by any of the other countries that have nuclear weapons, and against an attack by any of the dozen or so countries that will develop them in the next few years.
Unless, of course, we don't build the damn thing; then we're just screwed.
There is still a great deal of hostility between Russia and the US, and in many ways Russia's current rule is the same as it was, under a new name.
You got part right. Good job.
As a result, there are still a lot of worries about restarting an arms race.
Bzzzt, wrong answer, thanks for playing International Relations!
The Sovs were violating the damn treaty the whole time. The arms race in question was running the whole time; we just spent 8 years tying our shoelaces.
If the US is smart, it will not violate the ABM treaty--therefore, if the US is smart, Star Wars is gone for good.
Doesn't follow. SDI doesn't violate the treaty, so one means little to the other.
If the US is smart, it will get China to sign the treaty, merrily research and develop a system in complete compliance with the treaty, then abrogate it and deploy like crazy.
--
Shit, I just spent a bunch of my time fighting Partition Magic bugs a few days ago getting things right for a /boot within the first 1024.
Wish this story had run before that...
--
The file layout of the OpenBSD CD is copyrighted by Theo (the creator/packager of the OS) which makes copying, downloading and burning the CD illegal. This allows the group to support the project. If you really want it you gotta pay for it.
Actually, this isn't entirely correct.
The layout of their official CD is indeed copyright, and indeed proprietary and closed and just generally anti-open.
However, there is nothing stopping you from downloading the files, making your own ISO, and doing anything at all that you please with it.
They just don't make that very clear in their FAQ.
It's no wonder it's confusing. I'm trying to convince one of them (privately, I will not name names, except to say it's not Theo) to either change the FAQ, or let me change it. We'll see what happens.
I'm not confused, but lots of folks are. See the FAQ at LinuxISO.org for a perfect example; billy thinks it's the OpenBSD team's wishes that you don't create ISOs and distribute them, but that's neither my understanding from a careful reading of the OpenBSD FAQ, nor is it the view of the person with whom I'm corresponding.
It's just an unfortunate side effect of an elitist attitude that isn't at all uncommon in this segment of our industry.
It's the same attitude you see in the various arguments against improved Linux GUIs, user-friendly distributions, etc.
--
That's not very open, not to mention Open.
I think someone ought to put together a disk of their own and make the ISO image freely available. There's not a thing Theo could do to stop that.
There's already somebody else doing so cheaply, so free isn't much of a step beyond that.
As far as supporting the project; it's supposed to be open source. Linux and FreeBSD manage to exist without doing anything that asinine; is OpenBSD so unwanted that it can't work the same way?
Perhaps BSDi will bankroll a more complete security audit for FreeBSD, and make the whole question moot.
--
"Here is" is probably too strong a statement:
"Here is a description of a not-yet-existing product, that the manufacturer claims will etc. etc."
When something ships, or at least they announce a ship date and a price, then I'll be impressed.
I too have never had a problem finding ISOs for Linux distros, except for LinuxOne of course. :-)
What I'd like would be an ISO for OpenBSD, that's the hard one to find.
Also, there should be more PowerPC distros. That's a platform where we should be able to make some gains in the near future.
--
And it costs us some of that money even if we filter it out.
/dev/null through my procmail filter avoids using up disk space on my server, but it still sucks up some bandwidth. I'm paying for that bandwidth, and people upstream from me are paying for it too.
Sure, every message from *@info*.microsoft.com that goes into
JIT is kind of difficult in semiconductor fabrication.
It's not like the truck can pull up with a load of transistors right before you need them.
If upgradeability concerns you (and it shouldn't, there are several good methods of managing this, not the least of which being "make uninstall" with most decent newer programs) then you can always install a package manager, and follow a distribution's conventions.
Nothing prevents you from using RPM, for instance, on your homemade non-RedHat system.
Dude, what you'd build with that particular part you found is a rack-mounted server.
You know, the kind much larger than a laptop?
but I think there really ought to be a .sex just to help me (ummm) avoid it. Yeah. Avoid it.
.sex; it'll avoid you. :-)
The fact that you're posting on Slashdot implies that you won't have to avoid
Putting something in print that was submitted anonymously is just flat out irresponsible.
You had me, right up until this statement.
In the middle of an insightful, well-reasoned post, this is just rubbish.
If you submit something to Slashdot anonymously, you're not sending it to small, secret group of people; you're sending it directly to several tens of thousands of people worldwide, and you're listing it on search engines where it'll show up to anybody typing a keyword or two.
What would be irresponsible would be backtracking the Anonymous postings to identify their poster, so he could be credited; that would completely undermine people's confidence in the anonymity of their postings, and have a chilling effect on a tool that's getting a lot of important messages moved from inside people's brains (where they often aren't accomplishing much) and out into the wide world, where they sometimes are accomplishing useful things.
Slashdot isn't a private messagebase on a BBS somewhere, it's a public forum.
It's a bit like a big reader-edited newspaper, which doesn't really have parallels in the non-virtual world because it's not feasible without Tim Berners-Lee's amazing invention.
I assure you, when we collectively interview somebody, he doesn't assume he's speaking to use in our living rooms privately; he assumes he's being published.
If you post something to Slashdot anonymously, the very act of making it anonymous removes any right you have to hope it remains unpublished, because you've made it unattributable.
The unfamiliar face on the Bridge used to die by the opening credits. I hope the new series has the brains to make the Red Shirt the central character of many episodes, so they can explore the new world (and by reflection, our own) from many vantage points.
:-)
:-)
Yeah, and *THEN* kill him.
Think Tasia Valenza on "Space: Above and Beyond".
If you're wanting to upgrade your kernel, there's not much point in getting a whole distro.
Especially with Red Hat; 6.2 is not "kernel 2.4" ready. For instance, it ships with the wrong version of modutils, and they don't have an update yet, despite the presence of RPMs on the official modutils distribution site.
A new distro is only necessary for two reasons:
1) Upgrading so many packages at once, that you'd be wasting a massive amount of your presumably valuable time doing it manually.
2) Having the new disk so when you install a new system, it's current.
Otherwise, don't be in a hurry to upgrade; let somebody else find those bugs, while your system chugs along.
About 2 or 3 months after a release is a good time to look the situation over and see if upgrading is the right thing for you.
Half the cost? Maybe, but they already *BOUGHT* the Sun.
So they have two choices:
1) The Sun, total expenditure 100% of the cost of one Sun.
2) The IBM, total expenditure 150% of the cost of one Sun.
All of my co-workers on projects using IBM are wishing like hell they'd picked Sun, and meanwhile my Sun servers are happy as clams, chugging along, unaffected by the crashes over on the Blue side of the data center.
Clearly, all search engines need to immediately block all .jp addresses from accessing them.
.jp addresses.
I'm not kidding; the most effective protest that could happen here is if Google, Yahoo, et. al. immediately block off all
Let the Japanese search engines get arrested. Insist on it, in fact.
Hey, don't believe stuff just because it's in the legitimate press, either.
A buddy of mine (with some input from me) once released a bogus episode list for an upcoming season of Deep Space 9, and it made it into Australian newspapers as a "studio employee leak".
AICN probably would have spotted that list for what it was.
You can't think of a single one?
Such as, perhaps, Slashdot collecting one's real email address for granting a login account?
Collecting one's state of residence before allowing one to participate in a contest that's illegal in some states?
Collecting one's zip code to provide TV listings that actually relate to what's on one's cable offerings?
I think you didn't try very hard to think of those reasons.
Frankly, I think the solution is to simply bar access to one's site completely to anyone who identifies himself as under 13, and blame this law for it. If enough angry parents call their Congressman with complaints about, say, Yahoo suddenly being inaccessible, perhaps this law will be rethought.
WTF is the government doing in this, anyway? I can protect my kid just fine without their help, thankyouverymuch.
When questioned as to exactly why it's better than the wildly successful Palm, and why it's better than the dismal failure WinCE, Microsoft Marketdroid #THX1138 replied:
"Because it's got PC in the name."
Then three guys in black trenchcoats grabbed the questioner and hauled him out back. Scanner listeners at the same time heard this exchange, filtered through Microsoft's proprietary new encryption routine:
"eWay aveHay imHay"
"oopWhay isHay amnDay assay"
But his argument for not putting books online - even books with expired copyrights - is that there is something 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about reading online."
And someday not so long from now he'll die, and progress will go on without him.